Thanks to Mike Spring’s indefatigable
industry, his APR series of great pianists of
the past continues with this 7-CD album of
Egon Petri. A pianist of monumental
strength and grandeur Petri scorned easy
glamour. The reverse of, say, Rubinstein or
Horowitz who enslaved and, indeed,
seduced their capacity audiences, Petri kept
them at arm’s length, forbidding more than
passing intimacy. There was, to quote from
John and Anna Gillespie’s superb Notable Twentieth-Century Pianists, ‘a manifest
honesty; there was no artifice in his playing’.
Moreover, Petri was always true to his own
lights, reflecting in the grandeur and
occasional severity of his performances the
presiding spirit of his beloved teacher,
Busoni.

On the debit side, Petri’s Chopin is less
than revelatory or beguiling. Why is the
Prélude No 2more Allegro than Lento
(a familiar failing, almost as if the pianist
wished to erase Chopin’s morbidity as
quickly as possible)? He can be matter-of-
fact when he should be magical: it’s hard to
correlate this performance of Prélude No
23
with James Huneker’s description of music
that is ‘aerial, imponderable and like a
sun-shot spider’s web oscillating in the
breeze of summer, its hues changing at
every puff’. Such things are not for Petri; a
tough reasonableness backed by an
awe-inspiring technique was his calling
card. Yet there is no lack of underlying
poetry in his way with Liszt’s second
concerto. Considered and mature, his
playing is free from arrogance.

There is tremendous mastery in both the
Brahms Handel and Paganini
Variations: try
Variations 3, 9 and 11 from the second
book of the Paganini (Clara Schumann’s
‘witch’ variations) for an imperious
authority that can make even Michelangeli
sound yielding by comparison. Petri’s
approach to the slow waltzes of Variation 4
also offers a radical alternative to Géza
Anda’s dewy-eyed response. By contrast,
Brahms’s Four Ballades are disquietingly
brusque, straightforward to the point of
bluntness.

Petri’s mix of the terse and the giving, of
the severe and the devotional are at their
height in Franck’s Prélude, choral et
fugue.
There is Busoni’s piano and orchestra
version of Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody where
glitter is added to glitter and where, to
quote one critic, Petri’s playing ‘packs a
mighty wallop’. Most of all in Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier Sonata, you are reminded
that Petri was at his greatest in music of a
Himalayan scale and grandeur.
This is an invaluable album for all lovers
of a musical greatness that survived many
trials and tribulations (as detailed in Bryan
Crimp’s notes). Inexplicably, Petri was
omitted from Philips’ Great Pianists of the
Twentieth Century,’ the letter ‘P’
represented
by André Previn, who must have been
astonished to find himself next to the likes
of Arrau and Michelangeli. Petri’s towering
if formidable stature remains incontestable.